There are millions of people across the U.S. looking for more information about real estate, about home prices, about communities and specific neighborhoods. How are you going to stand out as the go-to agent in your local market? How will you win the trust of buyers and sellers just starting their online search?

Real estate marketing – whether you’re doing it old-school and are sending out mailers to your sphere of influence or are spending a large portion of your marketing budget on tech-savvy solutions like SEO and pay-per-click campaigns – can seem overwhelming even on the best days.

Let’s face it. You’re a real estate agent. You are focused on getting your clients to the closing table. You can’t fill your days with learning the best marketing tactics and implementing well thought out marketing initiatives, you’re selling houses.

According to the National Association of Realtors® 2014 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 92% of buyers use the Internet in some way during their home search process. In fact, with the way mobile technology is becoming ubiquitous in our search for everything from restaurants to Realtors®, buyers are increasingly finding their agents online. What does your website say about you? More specifically, when visitors dig into your “about page,” what are they going to learn?

Is your website a placeholder for your business card or is it doing business for you? That’s the question many of our clients asked themselves before they turned to us to completely redesign their websites. Some did an admirable job attempting to create a professional website on their own, while others…let’s just say they needed a little help.

A great real estate website can do wonders for your personal brand, your lead generation and your business. But, in an online world filled with cookie-cutter template websites, what can you do to make sure your real estate website stands out from your competitors?

At Agent Image, we believe in providing our clients with more than a template website where you can change the colors and photos to your liking. We’re building unique, beautiful websites that are more than just a pretty face! Optimized for lead generation, increased search engine rankings and prospect conversion, our real estate web designs are powerful tools in your online marketing arsenal. And, we’re masters of matching your web design with your personal brand and local market.

As more and more businesses find their clients and customers online, the need to figure out the most effective ways to stand out has lead to numerous studies about online user behavior. One of those behaviors is the way that users navigate around the web, and what visual cues stimulate the visitor to take action. In fact, it is the eyes that do most of the work without the viewer even thinking about it.

You’ve designed the most beautiful real estate website in your market. You’ve filled it will quality content. Your listings are easy to search and precisely displayed. But ultimately – when it’s all said and done – you’re not interested in how pretty it is or how many compliments it gets. You want leads, conversions … the phone to ring!

The first step to understanding how to build unbelievable real estate neighborhood pages is to put yourself in the homebuyers shoes. If you were moving to a new area, what features would you want to see listed on a real estate neighborhood page? You can paint a pretty picture with images of property listings or links to neighborhood attractions and utility services, but today’s buyers want more than that.

If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it make a sound? The answer is yes, but if you launch a website and no one knows about it, it will not be a success. The truth is, the steps to a successful real estate website launch start well before your website even goes live.

There are so many factors that play into making a successful website launch that we have broken it down for you by pre-launch, web launch, and post-launch. If you follow these steps, you can make sure that your launch is successful, but that you will be able to build on that momentum to keep generating more traffic.

According to the National Association of Realtors, nearly 90% of real estate agents today use social media platforms to build up their business and reputation online. Social media has been around long enough now that we know the benefits. You can interact directly with your clients and prospects. You can reach a much wider pool of interested buyers. And you can become a thought leader in your local market with the content you distribute via social media.